Site changelog

This page records site-level changes: new features, layout and tooling, directory structure, and major content systems. It is not a log of edits to individual soldier biographies (use Special:RecentChanges for those).

Newest entries first. When we change how the wiki works, add a dated bullet here.

How to update this page

• Add a new dated heading (or bullets under today’s date) at the top of the changelog list below.
• Describe the feature or site change in plain language — not a file-by-file diff.
• Skip one-off soldier page corrections and routine data fixes unless they introduce a new site capability.
• Agents and maintainers: after a site feature ships to the live wiki, append it here in the same edit session when practical.

Changelog

25 August 2026

• Sidebar sections — Split the left nav into Navigation, Reading, Directory, and Participate portals (was one long list).
• Notable Ritchie Boys gallery — Added Notable Ritchie Boys, a single page of portrait+blurb cards from both Notable Ritchie Boys Google Slides decks (linked to soldier pages when matched).
• Site changelog — Added this page so feature work on the wiki has a chronological home (Site changelog); linked from the sidebar and related help pages.
• Awards and honors (Wikipedia-style) — Soldier pages can show a ribbon rack plus a labeled awards grid (multi-line cells, content-sized columns, short rows spanning full width, tiny gaps between ribbons), with extra award notes as bullets. Built for Wikipedia notable imports (e.g. Chafee, Marxuach) and reusable for others.
• Wikipedia notables import — Pipeline to enrich existing soldier profiles from English Wikipedia (infobox fields, biography sections, Commons portraits, ribbon uploads) without inventing new soldier pages.
• Contents directory layout — Classes, Teams, and Site pages lists on Contents use a compact three-column layout (same idea as category pages). Any page that embeds a category tree gets that layout from site CSS.
• Soldier page chrome — Awards block sits in the main column after Biography (not crushed in the infobox); table of contents stays near the top after the lead.

August 2026 (earlier site build — summary)

These items describe capabilities already on the wiki from the ongoing build; exact day-by-day notes were not kept before this page existed.

• Soldier roster — ~21,000 pages titled Surname, First (ASN), with infobox, research notes, sources, and categories by class, letter, and teams.
• Edit soldier facts — Form on soldier pages to edit structured infobox fields without raw wikitext.
• Draft opening summary — Optional tool to draft a short lead from personal details and the Life biography for review before saving.
• Find a soldier — Main Page search by name or ASN.
• Directory — Contents with classes, teams, A–Z letter index, and site topic pages ().
• Stories and essays — The Stories, Introduction, Secret Heroes essays, Congressional Gold Medal, Camp Ritchie, and related topic pages.
• Contribute / Patrol / data notes — Contribute, Patrol, About the data, and Disclaimer for editors and class-data rules.
• Media and polish — Site CSS/JS for infobox layout, home page, stories galleries, upload helpers, and soldier photo handling.